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We test Huawei's Mate 8 smartphone to see how its Kirin 950 SoC performs. This is also our first look at ARM's Cortex-A72 CPU core and new Mali-T880 GPU. How does A72 compare to the A57 and Snapdragon 820's Kryo cores?

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The only SD 820 device we've tested so far is the Qualcomm MDP, which is the company's own development hardware. Because we had less than two hours to complete our testing, we were not able to collect any battery life data.

Titan

The non-removable battery is a dealbreaker. Only a fool pays $700 for a device that may only have a two year service life. As fast as this device-space changes, will it even be possible to get a battery replacement in two years?

Splendid

Kirin 950 unfortunately disappoints again on the gpu end. The six core snapdragon 808 does better.

But I see it mainly as a test of the A72. True, Kirin made a bad call on the GPU, but there will be plenty of A72-based SoC's that'll have similar CPU performance to this and possibly different GPUs, so I don't see the GPU performance as such a problem.

Now, the only piece missing from this picture is Samsung's Exynos 8890, with their custom Mongoose core.

Distinguished

Does this company release the source code for their android products? Googling this company and open source shows that at least they seem to put some effort into contributing to open source software but couldn't find if that policy extends past their networking operations. If they do comply with the licenses and release source code I'll gladly consider their products but if they're a POS company like Mediatek then I want no part of it and hope they don't manage to penetrate the US market.

Seriously, the single most important factor to buying an Android product is whether or not the company behind them actually complies with the license for using the software and it feels like most people don't even consider that. If the company stops maintaining the device a few months down the road, as is the case with 99% of android devices from china, then you'll find yourself SoL and left with no more security patches or platform upgrades.

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Great article. I miss the days when Tom´s Hardware made LOTS of analysis like this one, as AnandTech still does. This makes me come here less and less. The Design of the site is also in need of a refresh, in my humble opinion. This is constructive critizism, vale?
Regarding the SOC, its surprising how good it behaves, at least for me. If only Huawey would ditch their horrible UI, then I could consider one of their smartphones. Anyone knows what other brands will use this SOC?